Six points about Gladiator

So I have just watched Gladiator with much anticipation, but unfortunately I was a bit let down. I hadn’t planned on doing 6 points about it, but here we are I guess. For a movie so high on IMDB and that won best picture and the whole lot, I was let down. I can sort of see how somebody might enjoy Gladiator, as many people obviously had, but I just wasn’t thrilled by it. Also, it was the extended edition I watched, which amounted to just under 3 hours. Not sure whether or not that had anything with it, but who knows. Maybe I will re-watch the shorter version and my views might change. But for now, we have my 6 points about Gladiator.

1. The acting was very good.

Starting with a positive, the acting was not a problem with Gladiator. Russel Crowe was efficient in his role. Personally feel he shouldn’t have won best actor, but he was still quite good. Every supporting actor was very good in their roles. There were a lot of them so I won’t call each of them out individually, but they should know, none of you was bad. But by far, the absolute stand out performance in this movie was Joaquin Phoenix. This guy was amazing and played to his characters emotions perfectly. He let you see what was going through this Commudus guy’s head thanks to a brilliant performance. To be honest he was the only character that I was invested in and wanted to see how his story unfolds.

2. This was a really drab movie.

This was a snore fest at times. The colour scheme of this movie was awfully dull. Gladiator was depressing and it didn’t need to be. The screenplay was pretty awful at times and some conversations were as wooden as they get. It felt things were added in just so this would be along movie and get that “epic” status. This is something I will point out later. Everything felt dull and looked dull. Some sequences just dragged on and on and on and felt like they would never end. Some people may point out that action scenes weren’t drab. Granted they weren’t awful, but so much pointless and backstory was put in place that by the time an action scene came around, I just didn’t really care enough to be fully invested in it.

3. So many scenes were just rehashes of older scenes.

This happened a lot. They were beating idea across the viewers head. I seen so many different conversation’s and scenes about the senate. I really didn’t care and I got the idea of what was going on from the first time that they explained it. I didn’t need every character to have a different scene explaining what was going on. It felt as if they were adding bits on, just to expand the run-time in the hope of Gladiator gaining the “epic” title. Maybe this was only an issue with the extended edition but it just happened to damn much. I would have understood what was happening, and it then would have been explained another 3 different times, just in different ways. This happened way too much.

4. This was a bland, over exaggerated story.

As I stated before, the screenplay was pretty bad, which didn’t help matters. Overall though, this wasn’t an overly interesting story. The characters were meh, and this was a pretty basic revenge story. There was potential for something better there, but it stuck to a basic story, that was exaggerated. By exaggerated, I mean that this was a bland story, and they knew it, but tried to gloss over that with some action scenes and giving the title of being an epic.

This was a technically brilliant movie. Hans Zimmer scored this movie and some of his best work. This movie sounds great overall. The costume design was as good as it gets. The cinematography was also pretty damn good. There was some great colosseum shots and the action sequences (except the very 1st) were shot very well. Not a whole lot else to say about these points other than they were very good. Almost everything that I mentioned above got nominated for it Oscar, and deservedly so.

6. Overall, Gladiator is a technically brilliant movie, let down by a poor story and screenplay.

I had extremely high hopes for Gladiator. I heard great things and it looked a true epic. It unfortunately didn’t live up to my high expectations. Jaoquin Phoenix was excellent, Crowe was fine and somebody that I failed to mention was Ridely Scott. Not Scott’s best movie in my eyes. The source material was drab and he failed to do much with it to excite it. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think that this was a bad movie. I can see how somebody might enjoy Gladiator, I just seen past the couple of decent action scenes. Overall I am going to give Gladiator a 6/10.